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SOCHI, RUSSIA—This is the Olympics, not the Hunger Games. But for unprepared hockey fans it may go down as the Thirsty Games.

If Sochi has taken an unjust rap based on a handful of shoddy hotel rooms and toilet stalls built for two, the host city deserves to take one on the chin for an unsavoury, perhaps unforgivable quirk to its hockey spectator experience: There’s no beer served at the arena.

Actually, that’s not true. In the name of fact checking I tried to order a cold one at the Bolshoy Ice Dome before Canada’s 3-1 tournament-opening win against Norway.

“Beer, yes,” said the woman behind the counter at the concession stand.

She was almost giggling as she spoke, as if the joke was on me. Soon, a few of her colleagues were speaking amongst themselves in Russian, looking my way and laughing. As if by script, another worker chimed in with the punchline: “Beer, yes. Alcohol, no. One hundred roubles.”

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Witness Baltika Zero. It comes in a fetching can bearing a silhouette of a biathloner. I didn’t even have the stomach to crack it open. As I shamefully stuck my purchase into my jacket pocket I eyeballed two fans indulging in the product. I asked Maxim how he liked it.

Twenty minutes and his half-litre was half done. He cackled happily while his friend Sergey shook his head.

“My beer is in the garbage,” said Sergey, nodding at the bin.

How did it taste? “Like water from boots,” he said.

Maxim and Sergey, both from Sochi, said they didn’t come to the game to get drunk, but they theorized that the folks in power weren’t prepared to take them at their word.

“Why no beer? Because Russians, when they drink more, they become crazy,” said Maxim.

Canadians, hosts of the alcohol-drenched Vancouver Olympics, should talk. There’s no real beer served at the arenas perhaps in part because Russia’s lawmakers have been trying to reduce heavy national rates of alcohol consumption that had been linked to depressing life-expectancy numbers. Still, there turned out to be real beer at the arena, if only because some motivated young Canadians brought their own. So much for Sochi’s multibillion-dollar Ring of Steel. The three twenty-somethings from Calgary, all dressed in 1991 Canada Cup jerseys and red hockey helmets, smuggled in enough full-strength suds to wobble Don Cherry.

One of the smuggling Calgarians, Scott Simms, 27, revealed the not-so-secret hiding places for his nectar. He had one 500-millilitre can in each of the back pockets of his jeans and four or five in the backpack hiding beneath the Canada flag he was wearing as a cape. Oh, and he carried one in each hand as he strolled through the ticket scanners unbothered.

“We’re all double-fisting as we walk in,” said Simms, 27. “It’s like May 2-4 weekend when you’re 17.”

There is, to be fair, plenty of beer to be had in Sochi. Sergey, the local, said the perception that every Russian man is involved in a monogamous relationship with a vodka bottle is erroneous.

“Russians and vodka — this is the mainstream (perception) forever,” said Sergey. “But we prefer beer and whiskey.”

Alcoholic beer can be found in and around other Olympic venues. Molson has re-purposed its Canadian-passport-operated beer fridge at Canada House. And not far from the gates of Bolshoy Ice Dome there’s a concession stand that sells full-strength Baltika on tap. Plenty of revellers could be seen enjoying a pint as they luxuriated in the sunshine of a spring-like Thursday. A Canadian who identified himself as Jeff said he’d swilled some beer in the stands earlier this week at the snowboarding halfpipe.

But snowboarding with beer seems like the wrong medicinal substance. Hockey without beer?

“It’s brutal,” said Rob Kneteman, one of the Calgary drinkers of contraband. “I don’t have to be drunk to enjoy the game. But you come halfway across the world and you can’t have a beer or two? It’s been troublesome, to say the least.”

It was troublesome finally cracking open my Baltika Zero as I typed that final sentences of this column. I poured. I sipped. In the name of life expectancy, I sought out a garbage bin. Thirsty Games, indeed.

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